George Hermann Quincke
Professor George Hermann Quincke (1839-1924)
1924 Obituary[1]
"The Late Propessor Quincke.—With Professor Quincke, who died at Heidelberg on January 12, in his 90th year, has passed away one of the few remaining links with the great scientists of the middle of the last century.
George Hermann Quincke was born at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder on November 11, 1839, studied at Konigsberg, Berlin and Heidelberg, and took his Ph.D. degree at Berlin in 1858, where he afterwards lectured on Physics. By 1872 he was Professor at Wurzburg, and in 1875 he was called to Heidelberg where he spent most of his later time, and where he died. He did not write any book's, but the range of his scientific work was very wide. One of his first papers was geophysical, but he soon made a specialty of the problems of capillarity and molecular forces and invisible films. His researches on soap bubbles, on which he reported to the British Association in 1884, on vortex motion, on the transport of particles by the electric current, on the electrification of liquids forced through membranes, and on other electric problems, on magnetometers and on volume changes by magnetism, &o., were often quoted. He also constructed an acoustical thermometer, and wrote on refraction and polarisation and the optical properties of metals, as well as later on Becquerel rays and radium. He was one of those gifted men who can take accurate measurements with the simplest apparatus made up of a match-box and rubber tubing. Of a genial disposition and always ready to assist, he was very popular. Together with M. Planck and E. Warburg he was one of the curators of the Annalen der Physik, to which he contributed his last paper a few years ago, up to his death. The Physical Society of London elected him an honorary Fellow in 1882."